FEAST PROJECT - Artist Profile

Christy Johnson is a London-based artist and lecturer originally from Los Angeles, California. Trained in the Fine Arts, Johnson’s interdisciplinary practice involves time-based media and the photographic arts. She has primarily chosen to work beyond the context of the gallery, exploring new platforms, contexts and sites for her practice, as well as relationships to diverse audiences. The work includes artist’s books, public art commissions, installation works and museum intervention.

Johnson’s Feast Project stems from her previous work and continues her interests in the exploration of identity and the sexual body; the performance of gender in ritual contexts; the relationship of documentation and narrative structure(s); collecting, collections and the mobilisation of found material; the archive as ‘live’ process, a space of activation; and sites of memory.

Johnson has been involved in the interdisciplinary arts project Divers Memories, which sets out to explore the relationship between fact and fiction, uniting “participation/production with existing displays of historical objects … fusing our contemporary imagination with stored memories of European history.” (Chris Dorsett) Johnson intervened in collections and architectural sites at the Manchester Museum, UK and the Pielisen Museum in North Karelia, Finland.

She continues to be part of the Photography/Video Research Cluster at the University College for the Creative Arts. This group, which includes leading UK researchers and practitioners, provides a focus for research activity in photography, film and video, and also at the interface between them. It encourages debate about the development of photographic, video and related technologies and their relationship to art practice, by hosting seminars, visiting speakers and conferences. The group has strong links with Photoworks (Brighton) and LUX (London).

ABBREVIATED CV

Qualifications

  • Master of Fine Arts, Degree with Distinction (1988)
    University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, USA
  • Master of Arts, Degree with Distinction (1986)
    University of New Mexico
  • Bachelor of Arts, Magna Cum Laude (1984)
    California State University, Northridge, USA

Current Academic Positions

  • Director of Studies: Video and Photography
    Maidstone College University College for the Creative Arts, UK
    (formerly Kent Institute of Art & Design)
  • Principal Lecturer, MA Course Leader
    MA Artists’ Film, Video and Photography
    Maidstone College, UCCA

Selected Awards

  • British Council Grant (2007)
  • UCCA Research Grants (2006-07)
    UCCA Publication Grant (2006)
  • Arts and Humanities Research Council (2003)
    Grants in the Creative and Performing Arts
  • London Arts Board (1998)
    Award to Individual Artists

Books

Selected Exhibitions, Installations,
Interventions, Talks

  • Airborne (March 2008) video-sound installation
    Sited at the HANGÁR, Bakelit M.A.C. as part of the 7th L1 Dance Festival Budapest, Hungary
  • Missal (September 2007)
    Bookartbookshop, London, UK
  • ‘thirteen minus one’ in Intervention (September 2007)
    Fieldgate Gallery, London, UK
  • Notes on an Indulgence, Studio Space (Summer 2007)
    Collaboration with Catherine Clinger
    Vertigo Magazine
  • Christy Johnson and 33 Confessors (2007)
    Photographic Installation
    Oculorium Gallery
    UCR / California Museum of Photography, USA
  • The Set (2007)
    (Video Triptych installation)
    Project Room
    UCR California Museum of Photography
  • A digital screen-based exhibition of the Feast Archive and artist’s presentation (2006)
    Panel: Theory and Practice in Renovating the Archive Conference ‘Reading Spiritualities’ Constructing and Representing Spiritualities Through the Medium of Text: Literary, Visual and Sacred, Department of Religious Studies, Lancaster University, UK
  • A Tale of Two Feasts (2005)
    Greenhouse Series, No. 2 (installation and publication)
    George Rodger Gallery, UK
  • Truss (2001)
    CDAK International Exhibition
    Seoul, Korea
  • Action/Performance and the Photograph (1998)
    Commissioned by Reading Borough Council, UK
  • Divers Memories Interventionist Museum Projects
    (4 produced in 1996):
  • Split/Suite: The Making of Finland in Three Movements
    Collaboration with Roz Mortimer (video sited in main building)
    Pielisen Museum, North Karelia, Finland
  • Vihta
    Collaboration with Roz Mortimer
    (Installation in sauna number 60; performance to camera,
    SX-70 images and sound)
    Pielisen Museum
  • Model House
    (Photographic diptych and text sited in main building)
    Pielisen Museum
  • taxis, “In the Company of Things”
    (Photographic tags sited in the stuffed bird section of museum)
    Manchester Museum, UK
  • Signature (1995)
    (Site-specific Installation - slide projection, sound and text)
    Thatchum Nature Reserve
    (worked with the archivist at Hampshire Museum)
    Commissioned by Artpoint Trust and Reading Borough Council, UK
  • The Angry Act of Creation: Thresholds of Initiation (1992)
    Valokuvataide-Arkitaide, Symposium Lecture
    Helsinki Museum of Fine Art, Finland
  • Thematics of Violation (1990)
    (Large-scale photographic-sculptural constructions)
    University of Texas at San Antonio Art Gallery, USA
    9 October 1990 (public lecture by Jason Knapp)
  • Amphibiguities (1989)
    (Large-scale photographic-sculptural constructions)
    The Center for Contemporary Arts
    Santa Fe, New Mexico, USA